thread: 2008-05-06 : Fantasy lit and rpgs
On 2008-05-07, Eero Tuovinen wrote:
Ah, I wondered how Ralph and Brand ended up at my blog on the same day. There's also a third post about how women are handled in rpg illustrations.
Something I'd like to emphasize about that whole series of postings is that it's me writing about my own aesthetics, not prescribing for anybody. When I say that current fantasy games seem childish to me, that's not really an invitation to analyze and draw lines about what's appropriate and what's not for a product in general - you can see my grappling with this conversational angle in the comment threads. I think that I can very well say that these particular products strike me as childish without having to defend my sense that fantasy games used to be more sensible earlier at the same time. Although, I have to say, I do have a hankering to write more about how I perceive old '80s fantasy games and their influence in Finnish fantasy aesthetics - it seems to me a bit that I'm not connecting with the American audience with all those short-hands that make immense sense to Finnish readers. The whole American phenomenon of very... computer gamey and monty-haulish, cliche-derivative fantasy roleplaying is something I only learned about in the late '90s, after playing for years with a much more setting/character-based focus. Perhaps that's why I also interpret old D&D stuff in terms of how it's more similar to how Finnish fantasy games usually are instead of how it's similar to modern D&D - which might be why my sense that old D&D is different from current D&D aesthetically is not shared by folks who actually played D&D when they were 12 years old; they see the similarities, I see the differences.
